nBill 2.0 Development

[netshine]

Development is well underway on nBill 2.0, although there is a long way to go yet. nBill 2.0 will be a new major version - as such, it will not be free to upgrade from 1.x, but existing clients will be offered a generous discount (prices have not yet been decided, and licensing arrangements may change - eg. to allow multi-site licensing). There will be a new minimum requirement for nBill 2.0 - while nBill 1.x will work with PHP4, nBill 2.0 will not - PHP5 will be required.

What's new in nBill 2.0?

The biggest change in this new major version is a complete overhaul of the architecture - separating out all of the calls to the CMS into 'interop classes' so that nBill itself is not dependent on the API of Joomla (or Mambo). This will allow nBill to work with Mambo, Joomla 1.0, and Joomla 1.5 without legacy mode, and potentially with other CMSs, or even standalone in future. Likewise, when Joomla 1.6 is released, it should be relatively easy to adopt support for it simply by creating a new interop class. At the time of writing, most of this work has been done, although there is still some work to do on payment processing.

In addition to removing the need for legacy mode in Joomla 1.5, and the other architectural changes, new features that are planned include:

• Support for Quotes and Purchase Orders
• Ability to copy records (especially order forms)
• Printable receipts
• Introduce a template system for emails
• Provide an alternative (simpler, lightweight) method of PDF generation
• Allow more control over the core profile fields
• Enhanced order form editor
• Allow drill-down into the tax summary report to see what items make up the totals
• New snapshot report detailing the invoices that were outstanding on a given date
• Better support for partial payments
• Support for multiple compound taxes and fees
• Allow gross to net price calculations

And a few other enhancements. Whilst I will endeavour to include as much of this as possible in the first release of nBill 2.0, time constraints may limit what is included in the first release. I do not intend to add any of these features to nBill 1.x, as I want to concentrate on nBill 2.0 moving forward. nBill 1.x will continue to be supported though, and if I ever decide to stop providing support for nBill 1.x, ample warning will be given to allow people to upgrade if they wish.

If you feel there is a vital feature missing from nBill, please let me know, and I will consider whether it can be included. Just because a feature is important to you though, does not necessarily mean there is a large demand for it, so I will have to evaluate the priority based on the amount of time I have available for development and the other features that have been requested.

When will it be available?

This depends largely on how heavy my non-nBill-development workload is over the next few months (including answering nBill support tickets!). I am aiming to release a BETA version in the summer of 2009. There have already been significant delays in getting the development underway, so of course I can make no guarantees.

[leeuniverse]

Great....  hee hee, you and I are working about the same speed.  I had a feeling the new system wouldn't be ready, after a little use, until I was ready as well...  Looks great! 

[one7media]

Hi Russell,

That's cool about a new quote feature.  That makes me think instantly of nbill being a crm and billing component in one.  Not sure how much work would be involved, but it would go like:

Enter a contacts info as a lead --> Create a quote for that contact --> Quote is accepted and converted to project --> Contact is converted to a client.  The nice thing would be to have a link created for each quote that could be e-mailed to the contact for them to review and approve online, keeping everything nice and neat in one system.

The project area could be pimped out with timed billing - set the $/hr, log your time in the project, nbill creates an invoice based on the total time when the project is closed.  Or, you could take it a step further and set milestones so an invoice is created at each milestone.

Probably more work than you'd care to take on, but it sure would be sweet.  And I won't promise you that you'll SELL MILLIONS like everyone else, but I'd buy it anyway.

That's probably the biggest feature request you've ever had!

[netshine]

It will probably be quite a while before we're at that level, but it is very useful for me to know the kind of workflow that people hope for so I can have the potential future direction in mind whilst developing new features. So thanks for your suggestions.

[netshine]

Update (01/05/2009): Development of nBill 2.0 is progressing well, albeit still more slowly than I had hoped. I have again be hampered by delays (I should be getting used to it by now), but it will be released eventually I'm sure! Even if it is not in a stable BETA state before the end of summer, I will at least release an alpha version so that those who are interested can see how things are progressing. Support requests on nBill 1.2 are a significant drain on my time, often taking up about 40% of my working day.

Work completed so far
I have been concentrating on the back-end so far, and I am trying to get the larger and more complex tasks done first. Much of the work I have done is still incomplete because many parts are interdependent - so I have to start one bit, then stop and develop another bit before going back to the first bit etc. But this is basically what has been developed so far:

• Removal of all calls to the Joomla API, thus allowing it to run in Joomla 1.5 without legacy mode
• Started on upgrade script to convert nBill 1.2 database tables to the format required by nBill 2.0 (including an attempt to split out various amounts into their net/tax/gross breakdown for use in the new improved reports, and change of database structure for clients and suppliers to allow multiple contacts per entity)
• Added net/tax/gross breakdown to transaction statement report
• Added net/tax/gross breakdown to ledger report
• Added full breakdown of all items that go into each total on the tax summary report
• New snapshot report showing all invoices that were outstanding on a given ('snapshot') date
• New anomaly report showing any items that appear to be out of the ordinary (eg. duplicate transaction records, overpayments, tax breakdown mis-matches, etc.)
• Started on a new reconciliation feature (this may or may not be finished and included in the first release)
• Split out the personal contact details in client and supplier records so that 'contacts' can be held separately. A contact can be a client, or a supplier, or both, or neither. It is intended that the sytstem will create a new contact when someone requests a quote (quote feature not yet started), and they will be promoted to a client if the quote is accepted (as per the suggestion by one7media, above).
• You can now have multiple contacts on each client and supplier record, each with their own set of permissions to access the records of that client or supplier. So if you deal with several people within a company, you can store all of their contact details on the same client record, and allow different individuals to update their profile, view their orders, invoices, etc.
• Clients and suppliers are no longer vendor-specific - the same records can be used for any vendor (this may open up the way for improved functionality involving multi-company sites in future)
• Added a new feature to allow you to define the core profile fields and map them to values on the client or contact records. This will enable you to have full control over what fields appear on the client profile page, add or remove fields, decide which ones are mandatory, etc.
• I am currently developing a new wysiwyg order form editor. I am quite excited about this part because I think it will be much more powerful and intuitive. It allows you to drag and drop fields to position them however you like, and will allow multi-page forms, and full control over where the core profile fields appear. You can even have different core profile fields on different forms if you want. This is a big job, and will likely take a few weeks yet to complete.

Still to do
The following features are yet to be developed, but some of the underlying structural changes have been done to allow for their development soon:

• Quotes
• Purchase Orders
• Ability to copy records
• Printable receipts
• E-mail templates
• Simpler PDF Generation
• Better support for partial payments
• Support for multiple compound taxes and fees
• Gross to net price calculations

There are actually about 70 items on my 'to do' list, plus a number of suggestions that have been made in the forum, so of course not all of them will be included in the first release.

[kbrokes]

Hi Russell,

You can now have multiple contacts on each client and supplier record, each with their own set of permissions to access the records of that client or supplier. So if you deal with several people within a company, you can store all of their contact details on the same client record, and allow different individuals to update their profile, view their orders, invoices, etc.

Does this open up the possibility of being able to promote more than one user's subscription and access level?

I ask because the company I originally set this up for has both individual and company membership prices. They would ideally like to have the company pay a set price, but then allow any number of employees access to the site for the duration of the subscription.

[netshine]

Possibly. As I am still working on the admin side, I have not fully explored the front-end implementation yet.

[HSN]

Hi Russell,

The update fromt he 1st of May reads very interestingly. Version 2 is something I am eagerly awaiting as it has a number of features I am desperately after. For the moment I am getting by in using v1, excel spread sheets, and orders over the phone.

Just one small request if I may. You mentioned making a new wysiwyg editor for the order process allowing you to drag and drop fields for manipulation of field layouts etc. This is fantastic news for me and no doubt many others.

Invoices currently are created and in order to change the layout involves a massive amount of digging, trail and error to get right (as I recently found out when a discount value broke the form). Is there anyway you could possibly squeeze in a similar approach for invoice generation, quote generation etc?

Many thanks.

[netshine]

The wysiwyg form editor has so far taken me over 2 months of coding, full time, and it is still not finished (it is pretty cool though!  ). Creating a wysiwyg invoice editor would likely be even more difficult, so I'm afraid there is not much chance of that happening in the near future.

If I am ever going to get this version released, I need to cut down to the bare minimum of new features from now on, whilst ensuring that all the existing features are still available. As such, my intention now is to try to finish what I've started, add the quotation feature, and get it stable for release (purchase orders, a new PDF generator, partial payment improvements, etc. will have to wait for a future release). I think this is better than making everyone wait even longer while I get everything 'just right' - after all, I can still add the other new features after the initial release.

[HSN]

That is very true.

And I think that the release of v2 couldn't be soon enough, as the quotation system is a major part of everything. I am assuming that it would be possible to auto generate orders/invoices from quotations? (Sorry trying to get to know how it would work).

Regards,

[netshine]

My intention is to allow a quote to be converted to an order if it is accepted (and of course, an invoice can be generated based on the order).

[limessl]

There are so many features of V2 that I need for my business that it can't come soon enough for me!

[dynorodney]

Hi Russell

Hope all is going well with v2. Am i right in thinking v2 is being written so it can be plugged into other cms - you have a Joomla v1 gateway object and a J1.5 etc so its only the interface to the host cms that changes - which i guess is simply (haha) a facility of selecting the host customer id to link the nbill client record to, a facility to hook into the menu system of the host, update/create users etc? The reason I ask is that we went with J1.5 because of nbill but we are slowly writing our own CMS for use with our customers sites and at some point it would be good to move our own site to our own cms. However, we'd only do that if we could move nBill to it as well. Is the interface gateway class something you would have to write or would it be open for customers to interface into a CMS that you didnt initially support?

Thanks

Tony

[netshine]

You will be able to write your own interop class to inerface with another CMS. The interop class deals mostly with handling user records (adding, deleting, changing access levels, logging in/out, etc), but there are also functions for dealing with URLs, database connection settings, language, HTML editors, etc. The Joomla 1.5 interop class is currently 39kb, so there is not a huge amount of code involved.

[netshine]

Update (03/07/2009): Since the last update, I have been working almost exclusively on the new order form editor for nBill 2.0, and it is finally just about complete. I have now just started working on the quote feature, and once that is done, I intend to publish the first Alpha release (probably at the beginning of August). This Alpha release will contain the back-end features only - the front-end features will be disabled until the Beta release (which I hope will follow a couple of months later).

Work completed so far: In addition to the items listed in the last update, the only new thing completed is the wysiwyg form editor, which is to be used both for order forms, and for new quote request forms.

Work still to do: Complete quote feature, sort out licensing issues, and complete front-end functionality.

Work which will probably be postponed until a later release:

• Purchase Orders
• Ability to copy records
• Printable receipts
• E-mail templates
• Simpler PDF Generation
• Better support for partial payments
• Support for multiple compound taxes and fees
• Gross to net price calculations